His body is scarred by 20 knife and bullet wounds from decades battling Chinese gangsters and other criminals. The exploits of China's most celebrated police chief, martial arts expert Wang Lijun, even inspired a TV drama.
So it was a surprise to his admirers when Wang was suddenly "seriously indisposed" because of "intense mental stress," as his city's information service posted online, after he made a mysterious visit to the U.S. Consulate and was allegedly grabbed by state security agents immediately afterward.
In China, such a person is not likely to be mentioned again in newspapers and television outlets that are either controlled by the state or pressured by it.
Wang's story didn't vanish, however. The explosion of Twitter-like micro-blogging services (Twitter is banned in China, along with Facebook and YouTube) has enabled more than 300 million users to transmit the latest news and rumor about Wang.
China does censor social media, but a large volume of content can get through before it is altered or removed by the government. The rise of information that gets past Communist Party censors and transmits instantaneously to millions of Chinese comes as Vice President Xi Jinping continues his highly choreographed rise to China's top job with a visit to the United States this week.
"Political intrigue is a part of life here; it's like living in Washington, D.C., but in the Internet age … all of a sudden it's instantaneous and accessible to millions," says Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst and Internet expert from Washington. "This is China political intrigue 2.0, the first major political succession in the Internet age, and it's a real challenge to the government."
China's traditional media are managed by the Communist Party's propaganda department, while new media, mostly privately funded, has more freedom, says Hu Yong, an Internet and new media expert at Peking University.
"The Internet is both a challenge and an opportunity for the Chinese government. On the one hand, they use this new form of public space as a kind of measurement of Chinese public opinion," he says. "On the other hand, the democratization of information makes the government very afraid of losing the whole control of information."
